F5
Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV),
the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced
new security offerings designed to safeguard organizations’ network and
application infrastructures. With the introduction of BIG-IP®
Advanced Firewall Manager™ and enhancements to other
security offerings, F5 provides the industry’s fastest and most scalable
application delivery firewall solution. F5’s firewall solution is the
first in the industry to unify a network firewall with traffic
management, application security, user access management, and DNS
security capabilities within an intelligent services framework.

When deployed with F5’s new
VIPRION® 4800 hardware, the F5® application
delivery firewall solution provides performance levels well beyond what
other vendors can offer, including:

640 Gbps of firewall throughput

288 million concurrent sessions

8 million connections per second

Details

By consolidating the network and security functions of several BIG-IP®
modules into an integrated solution, F5 helps organizations reduce
management complexity and overhead, while maintaining superior
performance and scalability. In support of the F5 application delivery
firewall solution, today’s announcement marks significant milestones
from a product perspective, including:

With support for SAML
2.0, F5 now offers improved single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for
web-based, VDI, and client/server applications—whether hosted in
corporate data centers or the cloud. In addition, BIG-IP
APM offers identity federation across multiple product instances
within an organization, reducing the number of passwords needed by users
to access corporate applications. Managing credentials in this way helps
customers mitigate security risks and reduces the burden of
administrative tasks on IT personnel.

Enhancements to BIG-IP Application Security Manager™ (ASM™)

BIG-IP
ASM includes several new functions to help businesses strengthen
their security posture for web applications and address evolving
threats. BIG-IP ASM now features support for applications written with
the Google
Web Toolkit, meaning security teams can enforce application security
policies that use this widely adopted framework. Additionally, BIG-IP
ASM can better detect and mitigate clickjacking,
a growing web threat that attackers use to trick others into revealing
personal information.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing organizations grapple with attacks that
target applications, in addition to more conventional network and
perimeter threats,” said Mark Vondemkamp, VP of Security Product
Management and Marketing at F5. “Because F5 products occupy strategic
points of control within the infrastructure, they’re ideally situated to
combine traditional application delivery with firewall capabilities and
other advanced security services. F5 is committed to a highly scalable
and extensible approach for our customers—one that integrates
market-leading performance, monitoring, and context-based policy
enforcement for superior protection.”

With the industry-leading performance of F5 solutions, customers can
meet the rising demands driven by increasing numbers of mobile devices
and web applications. F5® solutions also provide the
processing power to guard the most demanding data centers against denial
of service attacks (both volumetric and resource
exhaustion threats)—even when those attacks are embedded within SSL.

Maintain Application Availability, Even in the Face of Attacks

F5 products provide customers with secure access to business-critical
applications as well as protection from large-scale attacks such as distributed
denial of service (DDoS). During a DDoS attack, a customer’s site is
inundated with requests from multiple origins in an attempt to overload
servers. To mitigate such threats, F5 devices can help identify
malicious actions, prioritize how requests from specific locations are
handled, and focus on addressing properly qualified requests.

Simplify Operations to Reduce Administrative Tasks and Costs

By aligning firewall security and access policies with the specific
applications that organizations rely on, management of security-related
rules, actions, and permissions can be simplified considerably with F5’s
application delivery firewall. Further, F5’s integrated solutions
provide sophisticated logging and reporting capabilities that can be
customized on a per-application basis across the application delivery
infrastructure. This means that network, application, and security teams
can easily access the security logs relevant to their tasks without
having to rely on a single global logging system for all events. This
level of granularity helps organizations and teams improve compliance
and planning efforts, while streamlining the monitoring of application,
network, and security events. In addition, controlling and logging
access to sensitive web-based applications can be unified across private
and public clouds with identity federation, consolidating password
management and reducing the time IT spends on repetitive tasks.

Supporting Quotes

“F5 is leveraging its strength in application delivery to extend into
the firewall market, using its products’ ability to understand and
optimize web traffic,” said Jeff Wilson, Principal Analyst at Infonetics
Research. “There are a number of use cases where this new product can be
deployed with other F5 solutions to better protect applications and
optimize their performance at the same time.”

“In adding to its slate of security offerings, F5 is broadening the
number of compelling, integrated solutions we can offer to clients,”
said Dan Thormodsgaard, VP of Solutions Architecture with FishNet
Security. “With the new firewall product, in particular, customers
can leverage their existing Application Delivery Controller investments
to help protect data center, network, and application resources from
emerging threats.”

“Enterprises and service providers are incorporating identity federation
to support SSO in growing numbers,” said Avi Saha, VP of Web and
Database Services at ADP,
one of the world’s largest providers of business outsourcing solutions.
“F5’s enhanced BIG-IP products make it easy for organizations to
integrate federation and related services to support all access
methods—HTTP, HTTPS, SAML, etc.—on a single device. In looking at the
market, we don’t see any other vendor that can offer the consolidated
functionality of F5.”

Availability

All F5 solutions mentioned in this announcement will be orderable in
February 2013. Please contact a local
F5 sales office for availability in specific countries.

F5 Networks (NASDAQ:FFIV)
makes the connected world run better. F5 helps organizations meet the
demands and embrace the opportunities that come with the relentless
growth of voice, data, and video traffic, mobile workers, and
applications—in the data center, the network, and the cloud. The world’s
largest businesses, service providers, government entities, and consumer
brands rely on F5’s intelligent services framework to deliver
and protect their applications and services while ensuring people stay
connected. Learn more at www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Advanced Firewall Manager, AFM, VIPRION, Access Policy
Manager, APM, Application Security Manager, and ASM are trademarks or
service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All
other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their
respective owners.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements relating to
future events or future financial performance that involve risks and
uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as
“may,” “will,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,”
“estimates,” “predicts,” “potential,” or “continue,” or the negative of
such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions,
and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in
these statements based upon a number of factors, including those
identified in the company’s filings with the SEC.

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